Where is the documentation?

The argument

The Post-Stratfordian case here rests on an evidential asymmetry rather than on any positive identification of a different author. Shakespeare is, by the standards of Elizabethan England, an exceptionally well documented man. The surviving record places him in a range of roles and transactions: he was an actor, he held a stake in a theatre company, he worked as a moneylender, he invested in property, he dodged tax, and he had a restraining order imposed upon him. Each of those activities left a paper trail, because each involved the kinds of institutions — companies, courts, parish and revenue authorities — that generated and preserved documents as a matter of routine. What that same record does not contain is any indication that he ever earned an income from writing. This is the pivot of the argument. The absence is not the ordinary silence of a thinly documented life, in which one would expect comparable gaps on every subject alike. It is a selective silence: the documents speak at length about the man's commercial and legal affairs while saying nothing about the activity for which he is now chiefly remembered. Had authorship been his profession, the argument runs, it should have generated the same sort of residue that his lending and his property dealings did — payments, disputes, contracts, or the disposal of manuscripts. The inference drawn is therefore not that the documents disprove his authorship, but that they fail to support it at precisely the point where support would be expected. On this reading the conventional attribution rests on later tradition rather than on contemporary evidence of a working writer. Post-Stratfordians take that gap to license doubt about whether the man these documents describe wrote the plays attributed to him, and to justify looking elsewhere for their author.

Context

Other writers at the time left documented evidence that they earned their living from writing. Even in cases where the writing itself has not survived, there are letters and payment records that showed they earned an income from writing.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The fact that there is more documentation about William Shakespeare than any other figure in Elizabethan theatre shows that he had the fame and public prestige we would expect from someone who wrote the plays. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because there is no surviving documentation to show that he made his livelihood from writing does not mean that he didn't. It is possible there are just no surviving documents. There is extensive evidence which places him in the theatre world. He was in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a troupe which would go on to become the King’s Men. But, perhaps most convincingly, his name is on the plays. Why would there need to be any further documentation beyond that?

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P3] Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.